Thomson Reuters transforms tax prep for 7K businesses with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Reinventing technology to meet the demands of modern tax challenges

Thomson Reuters is more than a global provider of tax software—it’s a company with a rich history of innovation, dating back to the 1850s. Founder Paul Julius Reuter used carrier pigeons and telegraph cables to deliver news faster than anyone else. Today, Thomson Reuters blends innovative technology with deep subject matter expertise, helping businesses and individuals navigate tax compliance complexities.

Yet even industry pioneers face challenges. In April 2023, Thomson Reuters’s commitment to customer experience was tested when its previous third-party hosting vendor struggled to deliver the performance customers needed during peak tax season. Slow application response times and unreliable access frustrated users and put the company’s reputation at risk. The customer presentation layer led to a disconnect between the platform’s capabilities and the overall user experience.

These challenges sparked opportunity. With a history of reinventing itself through innovation, Thomson Reuters recognized a pivotal moment that set the stage for the next chapter in its journey to serve customers better and lead the industry forward.

Driving innovation through large-scale migration

Mounting challenges demanded more than incremental fixes—they called for a bold, strategic transformation. Realizing its third-party cloud service could no longer keep pace with customer expectations or growth, Thomson Reuters set out to reimagine its technology foundation from the ground up.

To address both immediate performance challenges and long-term business goals, Thomson Reuters launched an ambitious migration of its tax preparation applications and 18,000 databases—totaling over 500 terabytes of data—to Microsoft Azure. This was more than a copy-and-paste migration. It was a strategic leap toward a modern, cost-effective, and scalable platform capable of supporting 7,000 tax preparation firms well into the future.

After evaluating several options, including updating its existing front-end infrastructure, Thomson Reuters chose Azure to reduce costs, increase agility, and improve security for its clients.

To bring this large-scale transformation to life, Thomson Reuters collaborated closely with Microsoft, applying the expertise of Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Factory, a benefit of Azure Migrate and Modernize—a no-cost offering designed to help customers move to Azure efficiently and confidently. Acting as an extension of the Thomson Reuters team, the Factory team provided the technical depth, tooling, and proven methodology needed to execute a project of this magnitude. The Factory team not only helped assess readiness and manage planning, but also designed and implemented the custom automation required to seamlessly migrate more than 18,000 databases. This tight collaboration helped ensure alignment across engineering, operations, and business units, empowering Thomson Reuters to modernize its core infrastructure without disrupting critical services.

Recognizing that the project’s scale called for a measured strategy, Thomson Reuters executed the migration in waves, instead of a single, large-scale move, to minimize risk. This phased approach helped the team manage complexity and maintain stability throughout the process. Bart Matzek, Senior Director of Technology, Solutions Engineering at Thomson Reuters, emphasized the importance of this approach, explaining, “Dry runs were used to identify potential breakdowns, adjust the approach, and ensure data was prepped in advance, with only deltas moved during the migration window.” This thoughtful, wave-based planning was essential to the success of such a massive migration.

Each technical obstacle became a catalyst for creative problem-solving. For example, to overcome the concurrent restoration limits in Azure, the team restored databases in carefully managed batches of 400 to 500 at a time. The team also materialized directory structures to speed up searches and optimized restoration workflows to maintain momentum and minimize risk.

Throughout the migration, Thomson Reuters tackled challenges like right-sizing managed instances with Azure SQL Managed Instance. It evaluated the service’s next-generation general purpose service tier to realize even more efficiencies and resolved performance bottlenecks. This required working closely with Microsoft and SQL Engineering and a relentless focus on minimizing customer disruption. As Matzek notes, “Microsoft was invaluable, working closely with us to optimize system load and ensure responsiveness at every stage. This deep collaboration empowered us to strengthen our technical foundation and build lasting resilience.”

Navigating previous directory limitations posed a significant challenge, making backup discovery and retrieval inefficient. Traversing these directory structures was slow and required additional planning to ensure data integrity and minimize downtime. Despite these challenges, Thomson Reuters maintained a methodical, customer-focused approach, executing each migration wave with minimal disruption and establishing a more scalable and secure platform.

Technical teams reengineered backup processes to generate differential backups, enabling faster and more reliable data restoration. Automation tools like PowerShell and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates streamlined deployments and helped maintain performance and minimize disruption.

Building a resilient cloud platform with Azure SQL Managed Instance

After considering all requirements, Thomson Reuters worked closely with SQL Engineering and determined that Azure SQL Managed Instance was the right database for this workload. It proved essential in modernizing the company’s virtualization stack and delivering a fully managed SQL Server experience in the cloud. By moving to Azure SQL Managed Instance, Thomson Reuters dramatically reduced its SQL Server support profile, achieved measurable cost savings, and streamlined management through cloud automation. It also provided flexibility to use standard edition licenses for general-purpose workloads, further optimizing costs for heavy data operations. Ultimately, the managed instance equipped the company to use new platform offerings, automate patching and backups, and help ensure high availability and advanced security for its data.

Azure Virtual Desktop with Windows 11 Multi-session was another critical component, providing a seamless and efficient desktop experience for users. This technology facilitated access to tax preparation applications from anywhere, offering a more scalable and secure solution while reducing the complexity and cost of managing physical desktops.

Log Replay Service in Azure was another key benefit during the migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance. It was used as part of the automation in Cloud Accelerate Factory to restore databases to the managed instances as soon as backups were uploaded to Azure storage. This kept the cloud environment closely aligned with the on-premises system, reduced manual effort, and helped ensure a smooth and fast final cutover.

Managing thousands of SQL Server databases on its own had been daunting for the company due to the operational overhead. Ryan Schlagel, Architect at Thomson Reuters, reports, “Transitioning to a Microsoft fully managed platform as a service was a game changer. Azure SQL Managed Instance removed complexity, letting us focus on strategic growth. This shift not only eased administration but also unlocked new opportunities to scale, optimize costs, improve applications, and elevate customer experience.”

By tackling these obstacles head-on, Thomson Reuters positioned itself to innovate faster and deliver a more resilient, scalable experience for its clients, ensuring its legacy of trust and reliability continues.

Successful migration of 500 TB to a future-ready cloud platform

Thomson Reuters’s migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Virtual Desktop stands as a blueprint for IT leaders seeking to modernize at scale while delivering measurable business value. Thomson Reuters successfully migrated more than 500 terabytes of data, supporting 7,000 firms and 70,000 users, and built a modern infrastructure that can scale with its business.

One of the most impactful outcomes was the dramatic reduction in SQL Server support requirements. By transitioning to a managed instance, Thomson Reuters freed up valuable IT resources, enabling teams to focus on strategic growth instead of routine maintenance. The shift to Azure Virtual Desktop further slashed costs associated with maintaining and updating aging virtualization infrastructure. It also provided a more secure, scalable, and modern desktop experience for users.

Mayank Shrivastava, Senior Software Engineer at Thomson Reuters, says, “One thing we consistently heard was how much more developer-friendly Azure Virtual Desktop is compared to our previous vendor. Deploying Azure Virtual Desktop was a smoother, cleaner experience for our teams, and that translated into better performance for our customers, seen in improved login rates and user satisfaction.”

While cloud operation expenses initially rose, the team’s focus on optimizing licensing, selecting the right service tiers, and taking advantage of next-generation platform offerings has set the stage for ongoing cost reduction. Early, rigorous attention to licensing—balancing standard against enterprise editions and business-critical against general-purpose — helped maximize ROI and ensure maintainability in the long term.

Looking ahead, Thomson Reuters is continuing to innovate. The team is actively advancing disaster recovery and resiliency, working with Microsoft to improve services like Azure NetApp Files. Additionally, Thomson Reuters is evaluating the next-generation general purpose tier of Azure SQL Managed Instance to realize further efficiencies. These efforts are designed to minimize downtime, reduce costs, and deliver an even stronger customer experience. 

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